However, the biggest tangible shift that I’ve experienced since my last update (which was almost one full month ago!) is the new laptop that I find myself typing this entry on. That’s right – after 7+ years as my go-to home computing machine, my HP Pavilion dv8000 finally kicked the bucket. Well, to be honest it didn’t actually kick the bucket – rather the primary hard drive started skipping and slowing down to an unacceptable pace. This is a problem that can be easily fixed by installing a new primary hard drive, but I took the failure of the primary drive as a sign… that it was time to get a new computer. And that’s just what I did! The picture below shows an incredibly bright picture of my new laptop computer – check it out:

There’s my new laptop and the free tablet that came with it.

The new laptop is an HP Envy 17-j029nr Quad Edition Notebook PC and, if I’m not mistaken, this is the highest grade, pre-configured laptop that you can purchase at HP.com.

It’s a pretty bad ass machine.

There are too many bells and whistles for me to explain all of them, but they include a 24GB solid state drive dedicated solely to making start up and shut down times blazing fast (we’re talking less than 10 seconds and, in most cases, less than 5 seconds). Other cool features are the Beats Audio, the fingerprint scanning and log-in system (now I log-in to websites by swiping my finger across a reader built into my laptop), a terabyte of disk space, a fourth generation i7 processor, Windows 8, and a back-lit keyboard which makes it easy to read the letters and numbers in front of me when it gets dark around my laptop. When you add up all of the great benefits that I’m receiving by using this new laptop over the old one, the relatively few annoyances that I have with the new machine melt away. For example, I really liked the layout, size, and feel of the Pavilion’s keyboard. However, after about a week or so of using this new laptop I’m getting used to the feel and touch of the new keyboard system. Also, the left part of the keyboard on the Envy seems to dip and appears extra “soft” (which isn’t the right adjective to use, but it adequately describes that side of the keyboard). However, I really haven’t experienced any negative outcome because of this “softness,” so I’m assuming that it doesn’t really matter that much.

As a guy who knows a little something about technology – and I admit that what I know continues to decrease in an increasingly technological world – I’m very impressed with this system. And I’m glad that I bit the bullet and purchased the pre-configured system instead of building my own. This configuration is the one that HP knows, trusts, and manufactures in mass quantities. They obviously chose this configuration for a reason and the expertise of their design team is fine for me! Also, as an older “tech head” I tend to suffer from analysis paralysis when it comes to buying a new system. If you haven’t heard of analysis paralysis, then you should know that it basically means I analyze and consider different purchase options until I eventually convince myself that I don’t want to be the guy purchasing the system that is either already obsolete or will be obsolete within days or weeks of my purchase. I managed to get over that perspective when buying this laptop and it was absolutely the right thing to do.

Two final points…

First, I don’t think that I’m done with the old HP Pavilion laptop just yet. The thing just needs a new primary hard drive and it’ll work fine. I can purchase a new primary hard drive and install it fairly easily. The issue will be kicking the internal backup drive into gear – if that can even be done. My purpose for doing that would be to transform the old laptop into a media hub for my television. Of course, this will all be easier to do and make much more sense once I purchase my own home and I have a living room that I’m setting up, but one thing at a time right now!

And on that note… second, it is really nice to not have the weight of student loans hanging over my head when situations like these come up. I use my laptop on a daily basis not just to browse the internet, but to manage the two small businesses that I own. I also use my laptop on a daily basis to manage my online presence for the classes that I teach and the one that I’m taking. Plus, my laptop allows me to work from home one day each week. So you can see what type of a crisis it is when I don’t have a laptop that is functioning. Before I repaid my student loans, this crisis would still be going on because I wouldn’t have been able to purchase a new laptop right away. However, with the student loans gone and no longer hanging over my head – I was able to purchase a new laptop (and a top-of-the-line one at that) without any problems.

The moral of the story is that being student loan free and facing a crisis isn’t a major problem any more.

As I was going home I tried to piece together more of the mystery in my mind. The car key, specifically, was in my hand because it was bigger than the other keys. “Why does that matter,” I thought. I remembered I used it as a tool – it was pressing down on a small piece of metal. “What was that piece of metal,” I thought again. Then it hit me: “Wait – it was something on my laptop keyboard!”

I remembered using the car key on my key chain to try to fix the backspace button on my laptop. A few weeks ago the backspace button came flying off of my laptop keyboard. Apparently, I was pressing down on it to hard and over the course of the last three years that I’ve owned this machine (best computer I’ve ever had, by the way) I managed to bend some piece of the metal that held the hinge of the key in place. To bend the piece of metal back, I tried to use my car key so that the two hard surfaces would press against each other.

But as I was driving home last night, I remembered that my car key was too big for this job and that I had to go into my desk drawer to get a small tool. In my desk drawer I have a plastic box where I put my stuff so I can avoid the drawer turning into your typical “junk drawer.” Some of you may know where this is heading at this point in the story…

I finally got home from work last night, went up to my desk, opened the drawer, opened the plastic box, and guess what was looking back at me? That’s right – my keys. I guess in the heat of the moment when I was fixing my backspace button (which I DID fix and which works wonderfully now), I just dropped my keys into that plastic box and thought nothing of it.

As Homer Simpson would say, “D’oh!”

Anyway, I know that some of the entries on this blog are coming up days past when they should have been uploaded. That’s my fault. Many of you know that I tend to write a lot of these entries days in advance unless something ridiculous pops up (like losing my keys), in which case I take the scheduled update and push it out to a further date. Well, lately I’ve been hitting the “Save Draft” button in WordPress instead of the “Publish” button and I couldn’t tell you why. I’m in the process of fixing that oversight on my part, so updates should run more fluently from now on. I’ve had an update on this blog everyday since I merged JerseySmarts.com and Joe’s Journal in November 2008 and I don’t plan on breaking the streak any time soon!

I’m going to try to find more hours in my day by waking up earlier each day. On a typical day, I generally get up between 6:30am and 7:00am. I’m going to try to move that back an hour and get my exercising in during the morning hours (I already know that it’s not going to be a long term success because I don’t like working out in the morning, but it might be good for now). So we’ll see how that goes…

The thing that really seems to sap the time from my day is this ridiculous commute to and from Trenton everyday. An hour there and an hour back. Sometimes I make it back from Trenton in 45 minutes because there isn’t so much traffic, but most mornings I wind up sitting in the car for more than an hour, so it all averages out. I like my job and all, but if a similar opportunity came up that cut my commute in half (or less), I’d probably take the offer.

Look, I’m an overachiever and I’m aware of that fact. Yes, I should calm down and not do so much extra with my non-day job hours, but I have to keep myself busy. I hate sitting around too much and I hate wasted time. Hell, when I clear out my DVR on the weekends I do it while I’m going to work on the laptop with the TV playing in the background! When I go to the gym I make it a point to read while I’m on the treadmill so I get two birds down with one stone!

I think part of the problem is the increase in non-day job business that I have going right now. Once some of my side projects are completed I should have some additional hours in the day. Until then, I propose that we extend each day to 30 hours long. Agreed?

The article makes a great point regarding the growing internet capabilities of handheld devices like cell phones and video game systems. It also points out the new abilities for digital cameras to connect directly to televisions and to printers without having to go through a computer.

Again, it’s pretty interesting so take a read if you get a chance, but from my view – I don’t think that the PC is going the way of the dinosaur any time soon. There are too many uses for the machine for it to become obsolete. I do, however, think that prices of new computers need to drop dramatically. And I’m not talking about paying $250 for a personal computer with a 15 inch LCD screen and substandard parts, either. I mean when Dell announces a new XPS and HP announces a new high-end laptop, these things can’t be priced at $2,000! There’s no way to keep the larger home computer market sustainable at that price range – it just can’t happen.

Granted, there are increased costs with creating a higher-end computer and that is understandable, but when computers that were high-end 3 or 4 years ago are still priced out of the general consumer market, that’s a problem. That said, Best Buy is offering a $200 computer for Black Friday, but the specs on it don’t look all that exciting.

First of all, it’s an eMachines computer. I know many folks (old college buddies) that have had problems with these computers, though I also know fewer folks who have not had a problem with them. As the article linked above says:

Don’t expect the world though. The PC is rumored to be powered by an Intel Celeron running at 2.66 Ghz (meaning no efficient and powerful ‘Core’ for you), comes with 512 megabytes of RAM (which is the bare minimum for doing just about anything on a computer these days), has a measly 80 Gigabyte hard drive, and it has no DVD burner.

No DVD burner? It’s 2007, right?

Anyway, check out those articles – they are pretty interesting reads.